Posted
by
timothyon Saturday July 12, 2014 @07:26PM
from the gives-each-droplet-ipv6-address dept.

Iddo Genuth (903542) writes "Israeli scientists from the Tel Aviv University perfected a method for using cell phone service towers' microwave emitters to measure rain and snow and even (for the first time ) detect fog with great accuracy over vast areas in real time. The research team members have analyzed endless amounts of raw cellular data and developed more accurate ways to measure meteorological information and added more parameters that they can now measure using their growing database. When combined with existing meteorological monitoring technologies such as radars and local ground based weather stations, the results show unprecedented level of accuracy that can give better and further weather forecast as well as special warnings about upcoming floods, fog and hail which can affect both people and crop production."

Actually, the post office is remarkably efficient, given the volumes of mail they carry. USPS alone, in one day carries more than FedEx annually, and in 3, more than UPS. (Take that, late Christmas 2013 presents).

They have to be efficient otherwise the whole system breaks down in short order. And by law of big numbers, of course, they'll run into problems. It ain't nice when it happens via the mail, but FedEx and UPS can be completely hopeless when it's their package. (You'd think with all that tracking information they could easily find a missing or lost package, but no. If a package gets scanned out but not scanned in, you're SOL).

The military application is that it is rumoured to be able to detect stealth aircraft.

No rumor that. Dunno about cell towers, but it was shown pretty conclusively in the '90s that the "hole in the sky" caused when a stealth aircraft blocks FM radio signals can be seen. Depends of course on having a good FM sensor and a solid transmitter or two in the area.

The only differences being that with cell towers, the receivers and transmitters are controlled by two independent parties and the signal itself was not intended for that particular purpose.

You know exactly where the tower is, you can easily reconstruct the RF signal as-transmitted by receiving the bitstream yourself and calculating the original signal as-sent. All that is left to do is compute the correlation between measured signals across your receiver network and weather along the receiver-transmitter p

Hundreds of rockets were fired at Israel in the past month alone. Israel didn't respond. Finally Israel said if you don't stop, we will respond. And what happened? The rocket fire rate increase. Even now, as Israel makes half attempts to stop the rocket fire with limited strikes, they have offered Gaza a ceasefire if they stop the rocket attacks. Gaza refused, saying they want to fight this war to the bitter end. The Gazans only have themselves to

Mositure and temprature variations causes bending of GPS wavepaths and small delays. Geophysicists ave been studying the "noise" in large scale GPS data to measure atmospheric conditions. Right now this mostly from dedicated high frequency tectonics GPS stations like Earthscope. There could be a way to "crowdsource" smartphone users for more data.